If my life were a movie, this is when we’d get a montage. Shall I prepare one? Sure. Here we go.
The rest of January and most of February goes like this: I feel like a million bucks in my new pregnancy clothes. I’m cutely round and hungry a lot but mostly filled with energy. I get on the train and if my coat is open someone almost always gives me their seat. My co-workers are equal parts awkward, sweet, and ignoring of my state. I work on the newsletter for work with a raptorlike voracity, but I’ve started to avoid Xaria around the annex. Do I finally say farewell to my dream of being a policy analyst and join the dark side—ahem—the finance team? My rabid desire for job security is at war with my aversion to budget-slashing. Marla and I start having lunch twice a week and I can’t believe we haven’t been doing this all along. She’s one of the most candidly upbeat people I’ve ever met. She shows me pictures of her children smiling, screaming, and snotting, and sleeping in the middle of the living room floor. I ask her, Be honest, what does your house look like at the end of the day? She texts me pictures of a toy-strewn hurricane-hit-it living room and I hyperventilate. Then twenty minutes later she sends another picture of her living room neat and tidy with a caption that says One thing at a time. For the first time I’m kind of excited about having a kid.
I’m seeing Willa and Isamu and Shep a lot at their house, but only together as a group. I don’t sleep over again, because if I did, I’d probably accidentally ask Shep to put his hands under my clothes again. Every ten seconds of every day my mind wanders to his too-long hair, his brown-gold eyes, the scent of the inside of his coat. Every twelve seconds of every day I mentally Taser myself.
I go back to prenatal yoga and laugh with the other almost-moms at how hard it is to even unroll the yoga mat these days. Dustin mails me a gigantic cardboard box covered over in crooked tape. It’s a little bassinet that connects to my bed so that I won’t have to get up when the baby needs me at night. I take a selfie smiling next to the box and send it to him.
Rock on, mama, he texts back. It’s a gold-star compliment and I wear it in my smile for days.
But the thing about montages? They omit a lot.
Here’s an alternate montage. Here’s me checking my phone as soon as I come aboveground from the train. Here’s me checking and double-checking my email every seven minutes even though I know for a fact I have my notifications on. Here’s me refusing to go out on the weekends anymore, especially not to Good Boy. If Willa wants to do something with me, we walk in the park or watch movies at her house. Here’s me avoiding the eyes of the nurses at my next doctor’s appointment. Only Nurse Louise is the recipient of one sad smile.
Because, yes, pregnancy is the biggest thing that’s happening in my life right now. The second-biggest thing? I haven’t heard from Ethan once since he walked away with half of our ultrasound images.
Yep. You heard it here first, folks. I’m knocked up and ghosted.
Well, maybe ghosted isn’t fair because I haven’t reached out to him either. But every time I think about texting or calling him, I think about his phone lighting up on his kitchen counter and Eleni seeing it.
I spend a lot of time thinking about Ethan crouching down on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. I think of him offering to be with the baby during the days. I think of the fact that he hasn’t contacted me once since. I’m glad I’ve started to search for stability elsewhere. Because there’s no fruit on that tree, my friends.
I’m in my apartment on a sunny Saturday most of the way through February, looking at the internet and doing some light crying, when the buzzer to my apartment does its fuzzy zappy ding.
I cross over to it. “Hello?”
“Hey, it’s Shep. I have some stuff for you. Can I come up?”
I scrub at my face and buzz him up, take a deep breath, and let it out all at once, pasting a smile on. But the second I swing open my apartment door, his face falls. “What’s wrong?”
I sniff and try to keep my face from crumpling down. “I’m fine!”
“He still hasn’t reached out?”
“Nope. And I was just torturing myself by researching birthing classes and imagining attending them alone.”
“Eve, I could…” I see the rest of the sentence gathering in his mouth. His generous mouth. His soft-looking perfect mouth with that tongue I’ve been daydreaming about.
Absolutely not.
“Don’t,” I tell him with a very bossy finger. “Don’t offer or I might say yes.”
He has a grocery bag in his hands that he shifts from one arm to the other as he struggles out of his coat and kicks his boots off. “Why can’t I offer?”
“Shep,” I say, both hands on my hips. Shep absolutely cannot, cannot, attend birthing classes with me. The only thing more painful than attending them alone might be attending them with a man who is happy when you’re happy. Who will turn his life upside down to help others, but my silly little pregnant heart will want it to mean something that it probably doesn’t. Shep is not the father of my baby. And I absolutely cannot pretend, in any way, shape, or form, that he is. Nothing good will come from that.
“But—”
“Ix-nay, arling-day.”
That is apparently enough of an answer for him because his argue face turns to his don’t aggravate Eve face. “All right, all right,” he grumbles, and heads towards the kitchen, where he starts unpacking the bag.
“What is all this?” I ask him. He’s up to his shoulders in my fridge, rearranging and fitting things inside.
“Groceries,” he says, his voice muffled behind the enormous head of cauliflower he’s jimmying into the produce drawer.
“Well, duh. Why did you bring them?”
“Because I went shopping and thought of you.”
I nearly swallow my proverbial gum. “Oh. Wow. Thanks.” I look around. “Where are all your groceries?”
He pokes his head out of the fridge. “I couldn’t carry it all so I just got yours. I’ll go back for myself later.”
“You…went shopping for yourself, thought of me, scrapped the plan, and just bought me a bunch of produce?”
He closes the fridge and dusts off his hands. “Is that a problem?”
A problem? Yeah. It’s a huge one.
You ready for that third montage?
Okay, there I am, defiling my detachable shower head on a regular basis. You know how much porn I’ve watched in the last month? More than in the rest of my life combined. My erotica stash has never seen so much action. My ebook reader slams a Gatorade when it sees me coming.
Remember that innocuous little word Nurse Louise said to me once? I believe it was overdrive? Well, yeah, apparently that was code for the absolutely unreal sex drive that some women get later on in pregnancy. I swear to God I should invest in a mechanical bull with a dildo strapped on. I’m being crude, I know, but being so horny you watch professional sports just to see man-sweat will do that to you.
Lately I’m finding myself siding with judgy Lorraine from work. You should be married when you have a baby. Her reasons are religious. Mine are that I believe every pregnant person deserves to be within arm’s reach of something readily humpable at any given moment.
And he asks if it’s a problem that he’s grocery shopping for me in that T-shirt that’s showing me the exact shape of his wide shoulders? And then he bosses around my produce with those clumsy-big fingers of his? And then he washes his hands and puts his weight on his elbows and leans towards me, head cocked to the side? A wash of stubble on his face? Brown eyes and messy hair and his Shep face that I just wanna sit on?
Yeah. It’s a problem.
“Nope!” I squeak. “Thanks, by the way. I was thinking of doing an early dinner anyhow.”
“I’ll make it,” he says. “Were you hoping for anything in particular?”
I’ve reached my limit. If he does one more nice thing for me right now I’m going to absolutely destroy our friendship. With my teeth.
“Just—You—Sit.” I’m steering him by his shoulders over to the barstools that line my kitchen counter. He’s goes willingly but at the last second resists.
“Are you sure?”
I do a quick experiment and try pushing, with all my strength, on his shoulders. He doesn’t budge. Honestly, he barely looks like he notices.
I take a step back and survey him. “Sit,” I say again.
He does.
I’m all skeptical eyes and scuttling sideways like if I don’t keep him in my eye line, I’ll turn around and he’ll somehow be ten times hotter.
“Where’d you get that T-shirt?” I ask him testily as I slap fixings for double-decker fried egg sandwiches and fruit salad on the counter. What I’m really asking is where he got all the muscles underneath it, but that’s neither here nor there.
“Some store. At least let me dice the fruit.” He’s leaning across the counter, fingertips on the cutting board, sliding it towards himself, and that’s the story of how I realized that even sitting on the stool, Shep’s body is almost the same length as my kitchen.
I flip the eggs and then rummage around for a big bowl for the fruit salad. Shep scoops handfuls of melon into it. Each piece has been chopped messily into a different shape and size. It’s so cute I’d like to personally kiss each and every piece.
I quickly turn my back and start assembling the sandwiches. They are a very private recipe that is delicious to me and only me. A smorgasbord of cheese and random junk from jars in my fridge door and, yes, pickles, and vegetarian deli “meat” straight from the fridge. They are likely disgusting and I would serve them to zero people on this earth who aren’t Shep. But for some reason, I have this hunch that he’s going to like it.
“That’s…horrific,” he says after his first bite.
Okay, so maybe he won’t like it.
“Well, give it back, then!” I say, trying to slide his plate away from him.
“No! No. It’s horrific in a satisfying way.” He reclaims the plate and takes another gigantic bite. “It’s the bad boy of sandwiches. I’m not supposed to want it, but I do.”
“Definitely the sandwich from the other side of the tracks.”
“I don’t think I’m going to be able to look at myself in the mirror after this.” He’s already halfway through his sandwich and I’m satisfied with his reaction.
We finish our sandwiches and Shep quickly cleans up the kitchen while I scoop out fruit salad for both of us. By tacit agreement we move to the couch and put our feet up on the coffee table and stab the melon chunks one by one, savoring them like they’re bites of ice cream.
“Nothing like a good honeydew.”
I pat the top of his head. “Oh, sweet innocent Shep. The honeydew is only there to better illustrate how far superior cantaloupe is.”
Instead of batting my hand away, he leans into it and sets his clean bowl on the credenza behind the couch.
If anyone needed proof that I’m lost in the weeds for this man, it’s the fact that I don’t jump up to find a coaster.
After a moment, he reaches up to loop his fingers around my wrist, puppeteering my still hand against his hair, making me pet him.
Do friends lean against each other and pet each other’s hair?
I can’t think about that right now. I can’t think at all. This is wonderful.
I set my bowl aside too and give in. His hair is the blond-brown of a lion’s mane and just a bit too shaggy to be an actual style. I’d like to take a swim in it. A lazy summer’s backstroke, with the sun so bright you’re forced to close your eyes.
I’m transported back to familiar summer afternoons, floating on my back and getting lightly roasted in the sunshine. “When was the last time you made it to Setter’s Pond?” I ask him.
His eyes pop open. From this close, they’re a far lighter brown than I’d thought they were. Almost yellow. Almost gold. Late-afternoon sun. That buxom orange right before it gives up and fades to twilight.
“A couple of years ago. I brought Heather. I wanted to show her where we spent our summers. But it wasn’t the same.”
“What do you mean?”
“Someone added a boat launch so there were a lot of boaters and you could tell the part with the rope swing had become kind of a party spot. There were beer cans and stuff all around. It wasn’t like when we were kids.” His eyes are on me.
I can’t watch my fingers get lost in his hair or else I’m going to do something very silly, so I watch my own feet instead. “It used to be so quiet when we would go.”
He nods. “I’m sure it’s more idealized in my head but I remember it as you, me, and Willa. Nobody else around.”
“Peanut butter sandwiches and bags of potato chips.”
“Raspberry lemonade,” he says, and I feel a thrill that he remembers it the same way I do.
“Remember that big beach towel your mom would pack for us? The queen-sized one?” I ask.
“Of course I do. I used to claim it and lay on one tiny corner of it, hoping that you’d take the other half.”
I laugh, but my blood has suddenly turned to electricity.
“Really?” I ask.
“Sure,” he says. “Nobody wants to share a towel with their sister in a two-piece.”
I laugh again, but this time my blood is fizzling back to normal. Maybe he didn’t quite mean what I thought he might mean.
“I miss naps at Setter’s Pond,” he says. “That was the best sleep of my life.”
“You always were a very proficient sleeper,” I remember with a nod.
“Not since Mom died.”
I catch his eye. “Wait. Really?”
He scrubs a hand over his hair and our fingers brush. “Yeah. I mean, it’s gotten a lot better than it was, but for a long time I was barely sleeping. Hey, what’s wrong with your feet?” he asks, squinting down at them. I’ve been slowly kneading them against the edge of the coffee table, the way kittens do against their mother’s bellies.
“Nothing. Just pregnant.”
“They’re sore?” he asks, and before I can even answer, he’s reaching for them, gathering them up and swinging them into his lap. I’m rotated ninety degrees so that my back is against the arm of the couch and he sits up straight in the center, slightly crowding me.
“You always have the best socks,” he says.
These ones are so fuzzy they literally do not fit inside shoes, so they’re my house socks, my weekend socks, my cry-and-look-at-birthing-classes socks.
But right now they’re my try-not-to-moan-like-I’m-orgasming socks and I can see this is going to be a challenge.
Shep’s fingers are bossy-firm and for a man who chops melon with reckless abandon, he is methodically, carefully, taking care of every inch of my foot.
His fingers freeze and I feel his eyes on my face even though I’ve got two hands covering it. “Are you all right?” he asks.
“Jesus fuck don’t stop,” I groan, and he resumes. I feel him shift, hear a throat clear, and I do believe that my response has punted us soundly out of friends-definitely-do-this territory.
There are things I don’t know about Shep. And they are things that I cannot, cannot ask about right now sitting on this couch. They are sweaty things. Hem-of-his-T-shirt-caught-between-his-teeth-so-it-doesn’t-get-in-the-way things. They are things that require a warm washcloth immediately after and his body as a pillow for falling into exhausted, sated sleep. Not even if I were drunk right now could I ask him about that.
“Should we watch something?” I ask, pulling my feet off his lap and straightening up.
“Oh.” He looks at the place my feet just were. “Sure.”
He leans over and grabs the remote and hands it to me. I channel surf and land on Thor, the funny one. “Ooh! Yes. We’re just in time.”
“In time for what?” Shep asks.
“The big haircut.”
“Huh? I haven’t seen this movie before.”
“Oh. Everything is going down the shitter for Thor and blah blah blah, he gets his hair chopped off. It’s my favorite part.”
“And that’s your favorite part…why?”
“You’ll see.”
He narrows his eyes and studies the screen with such concentration I want to just scream. He’s so cute I can’t stand it. The big moment happens and he still looks confused. He turns and sees my face and then understanding descends. “Ah. You like it because you think he gets even hotter after his haircut.”
“Duh.”
“Really? Haircuts?” Shep cocks his head to one side. “I always think men look so stupid right after they get a haircut. You can see all their tan lines. It’s very…back to school, you know?”
“You’re entitled to your opinion,” I tell him graciously. “You’re wrong, but you’re entitled to it.”
He laughs and now that the haircut scene is over, I channel surf again. We land on a commercial for some kind of drug and one of the side effects that the fast-talking honey-voiced lady announcer lists is sleeplessness. I mute the commercial.
“Shep…back then. When you weren’t sleeping. When you were struggling after your mom died…”
“I know,” he says quickly.
But I have to say it all. I can’t let him assume. “I would have been on the train in half a second. There’s nothing I wouldn’t have—”
“I know,” he repeats.
“Do…do you do that a lot?” I ask quietly. Willa said that he’s always felt like a sidekick. When do sidekicks get the spotlight? “Not tell people when you’re hurting?”
“I’m trying to get better at it.” He looks at his hands, which spread down over his knees. He leans forwards and laces his fingers, drops his head. “Honestly, I’m trying to learn from you. You’re so good at saying how you feel. At feeling how you feel.”
“Only with you. With everybody else I only say about one-tenth of what I’m feeling.” Even with Willa these days. “Besides, I’m the hot mess express. It would be really grand to have nice, tame emotions that are best relayed on pink stationery with loopy handwriting and a lovely little stamp with an angel on it. That’s how I’d like to start telling people how I feel.”
He shakes his head. “I’ve seen your handwriting. All spiky and tilted. Total serial killer handwriting. Anyone who got a letter like that would think for sure you were threatening them.”
I laugh. He laughs. He’s still leaned forwards, his elbows on his knees, looking back over his shoulder at me. I tuck my feet to one side and play with the fuzzy socks. “Shep…I’d like to be a person you can tell how you’re feeling. Even if you aren’t proud of the feeling, you can tell me and it won’t change how I think of you. Especially if you’re having a hard time. I want to know. I know that Heather took care of you, but I would have…”
I trail off because how the hell to finish that sentence? I would have what? Taken the train up to Heather’s apartment and tucked him into bed? Made him hot cocoa? Listened to him talk for hours on the phone and made sure he had at least one square meal a day?
Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. Yes to all. Of course I would have done those things for Shep. Just like I did those things for Willa.
He knows everything I don’t say. “And that’s why I didn’t tell you…” he says as he points at the expression on my face. “At that point, my main priority was making sure Willa was all right. She had it harder than I did, I think. And I knew that you and Isamu had to be there, with her. If I’d told you I was roadkill on the shower floor, you would’ve shown up with a spatula. But Willa couldn’t make it through without you. So I just…did my thing and let Heather take care of me and, honestly, it worked. That was the hardest time in my life, but I got to the other side.”
“Is…is that why you didn’t move out even though you broke up? Because relocating was just too much to handle?”
“Yeah. It was actually Heather’s idea for me to stay, bless her. I broke up with her before my mom died. But she said I should take things one step at a time. She put her whole life on hold for me. We knew we weren’t going to get back together. But she just…put me up in her guest bedroom and let me cry on her shoulder for a year. She’s a good person. She’s such a good person.”
I’ve never been wild about Heather—it’s hard to like someone who looks at you like you smell bad—but at this particular moment, I feel a swell of gratitude for her. I couldn’t be there for Shep, but she was. And thank goodness. If he really was crying on shower floors, I’m glad to know he wasn’t doing it alone.
“If the arrangement was working, why’d you move out, then?”
“She met someone she was interested in. I was convalescing. I’d made it through the darkest parts of grief, I think.” He sighs and scrapes a hand through his hair. “Generally, it was just time.”
“She’s dating?”
“Yup.” He nods and sits back. “Rick. He’s a really nice guy. They’re moving in together next month.”
“Wait.” I shake the cobwebs out of my head. “You’ve met him?”
“Yeah. Like I said, they started dating while I was still living there. He used to come over.”
“Oh, my God. Shep!” I punch him on the shoulder. “Don’t you ever look out for number one?”
“Huh?” He rubs at his shoulder, so I bat his hand away and rub at it myself.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to punch that hard.”
“You’re punching me because I like Rick?”
“I’m punching you because you don’t have a jealous bone in your body and it’s annoying.”
Maybe I’m punching him for Rick. But come on, it’s clear I’m punching him for Ethan. Shep rubs my belly and eats my sandwiches and wanted me to share a towel when we were teenagers, but he also smiles at Ethan and shakes his hand and seems sad that he’s ghosting me. It’s confusing and frustrating and poor Heather must have spent a fair amount of time wanting to smack Shep in the face with a pillow.
He cocks his head to one side, his eyes searching mine, and I can tell that he’s trying to parse out my meaning.
I unmute the TV, his eyes on the side of my face, and we settle into a documentary about coral reefs. I wake up an untold amount of time later to Shep pushing the hair out of my face. There are two Sheps and I’m confused. One of them is leaning over me and one of them is lying behind me, holding me. I’m warm and comfortable and could lie like this until morning.
“Eve,” one of the Sheps says. “You should go to bed.”
“Hmmm?” I ask.
“It’s late,” the Shep standing over me says.
“Oh.”
I sit up and the dream Shep disappears.
I wobble when I stand and he grabs me by the elbow. I toddle towards my bedroom and then the sheets are being pulled back and I’m crawling in and the lamp is clicked off and look, there’s dream Shep again. He’s there on my side of the bed. I make room for him. My hair gets brushed out of my eyes again.
“Sleep well,” he says. My bedroom door clicks closed, and he goes.